The Tornado Comes To Chicago.

Last night, Chicago got hit by a tornado. It was pretty spectacular.

This particular storm rolled over Evanston around 7:45pm, while I was at the first read-through for "Vaudeville & Vixens". While we were working our way through the "Doctor Sketch & Doctor Plumber" scene, we heard a series of thunderclaps that made everyone around the table shake a little bit. We briefly considered pausing the reading, but we were very safe in the theater, so there was no point in stopping our work. During the 15 min break, I ran out in the rain to get a bottled water and a candybar from the corner newsstand. I stood, briefly, under the railway underpass, with a nice view of a big swatch of sky, watching the lightning strobe and arc through the sky.



After rehearsal, Miss Denita drove me south down into the city and it seemed as if the worst of the storm had passed. Indeed, when I got out of her car at Lawrence to catch the bus, it had almost stopped raining entirely and even the wind and lightning had moved off. On the bus ride down Lawrence, I returned Jenn's call to find out that she was without power in her apartment, watching the storm roll over. We chatted, keeping her entertained in the darkness, while I walked south on Lincoln Ave. Oddly enough, I could see lightning and storming off in the distance and there was a very slight rain for the whole walk home. It was as if the storm had receded for just the short bit of time that I needed to get home.



Because the heavens opened up and dumped rain on us, when I got home and had taken Maggie out for a quick pee. I stopped in the doorway of my backyard, still chatting with Jenn, to watch the lightning wildly flash through the sky. The wind picked up and the big tree behind my house swayed and danced in the rain. I've never seen that particular tree get that active before. I pulled up a chair from the backporch and sat in the doorway, watching the storm grow in intensity.

And it did. First the lightning got closer and closer. Giant, powerful stabs of electricity that blossomed down from the clouds and shot tendrils of lightning off at odd angles. The wind blew with gale force intensity and drove the pounding rain down. A hard, heavy rain that hung in curtains across the backyard. It was one of the most powerful storms I'd ever seen.




Jenn and I tracked the storms progress as it marched steadily across the city. I got the wind and rain first and then it hit in Jenn's neighborhood. I would get a fierce lightning flash and thundercrap and there would be a short delay and Jenn would hear the thunder off in the distance. Or I would see a flash of lightning off in the distance and then hear the tear of instant thunder in the phone and Jenn would yelp "Holy Shit!"

Maggie was with me the whole time. She was, of course, stone-shitting terrified by the whole affair. She alternated her time between pacing by the stairs, hiding under my chair and trying to climb up into my lap. She was in my lap, paws clawing at my pants, when a lightning strike hit right by the house and blew out two different transformers on our block. The lightning and thunder hit instantly for that one and there was a bright, daylight strobe of light and then a pop and crash and the tree behind my house glowed green in an extended arc of light shooting out of the transformer. Half a block away, down the alley another transformer blew, shooting a rain of sparks that quickly died out and then the same pop, crash and flash of green light. That was pretty scary shit. Maggie nearly jumped out of her fur and I thought, "Well, that was close enough for me" and Maggie and I went upstairs for a treat of Beggin' Strips for her and a small dollop of ice cream for me. Jenn ended the call because she was scared of killing her phone with no way to recharge it. I settled down with a book and read until the storm passed over completely.

For a time though, while I was out in the rain, that was one of the most exciting and beautiful storms I'd ever seen. It was a thrill to watch and would've been even more exciting to lay out in the rain, out in some field, feeling the rain smack on your skin on a warm summer night, losing your sense of self in the intense, godly display of power and random, fateless, spectacular destruction.

Cheers all,
Mr.B